Episode 129: Forgive Yourself for Failing to Achieve a Goal
You set a goal. You’re excited. You have so much ambition welling up inside ... and then you get clobbered.
If you’re alive, you’ve probably had that experience. That’s when the insecurities creep in. You immediately get mad at yourself. You come up with all sorts of reasons to support the belief you’re not as great as you should be.
Let’s take a moment to be honest. If it were really easy to have killer goals that you knock out of the park, everybody would be doing it. If it were easy to have a million-dollar business, everyone would have one. If it were super easy to have six-pack abs, everybody would have them. But it's hard.
Forgive yourself for failing to achieve a goal
If you’ve ever gotten frustrated and asked yourself “Why doI keep doing this?” recognize that in that moment, you’re being angry at yourself instead of getting back in the game. So, if you’ve set a goal and failed, I need you to forgive yourself. If you don’t, it keeps the issue in place. It keeps this idea that you don’t take action in place, along with all those other lies, like “I suck.”
And maybe, if you look closely at what you need to forgive, you might find that goal wasn’t yours in the first place. Maybe the goal was what you thought you were supposed to do. Maybe the goal was what everybody else was doing.
Or maybe you knew all along when you set that goal that you weren’t going to do it, and now you have a great excuse to go lay on the couch and feel bad about yourself. It seems counterintuitive, but it’s so comfortable for us to assign blame and stay mad than press forward.
So, the forgiveness element is key.
Why You Set the Goal
Ask yourself if the goal you set is going to expand who you are. Is the goal going to challenge you in a new way? We love to be challenged; we don't like to be bulldozed. That's not fun. We love to stretch. We love to know that today we did better than yesterday. When we start to feel discouraged or when we haven't forgiven ourselves, we stop challenging ourselves, and that can start to create a really vicious cycle.
So, as you're looking at the goal you set and wondering if it's the right goal, look at whether it's going to challenge you. Are you going to have to learn something new? Are you going to have to talk to more people? Are you going to have to do more on a daily basis than you're used to doing? Another way to look at this, in case you don't love the word "challenge," is to ask yourself if the goal will make you feel expansive.
Would it stretch you beyond where you are? That's an expansive goal.
We love to be challenged, but we don't like to be bulldozed. We love to stretch. We love to know that today we did better than yesterday.
We veer ourselves off course by choosing the wrong goal. Any time you fall off track, your very next step can put you right back on the path. I think we forget that, especially those of us who are perfectionists. Understanding that your very next step can be one that takes you in the direction you want to go. That is everything.
I saw a great post from Mel Robins that said "You know your mind will do anything to take you off track, it just will. That's its job. But you have two things you can always do. The second you realize this is happening is tell your mind to be quiet and to start behaving as the person you want to become," and that is the key to this last step.
Become the person who succeeds at this goal
We veer ourselves off course by choosing the wrong goal. Any time you fall off track, your very next step can put you right back on the path. I think we forget that, especially those of us who are perfectionists. Understanding that your very next step can be one that takes you in the direction you want to go--that is everything.
Recognize that you have access to who you want to become RIGHT NOW.
Ask yourself, who am I going to have to become to get this done? That is the actual prize. To succeed and achieve your goals, understand that it's day-to-day actions over time that will help you become that person.
Listen to the difference. It's not "I didn't achieve my goal or I'm going to achieve that outward goal," it's "Who am I going to have to become in order to make that goal happen? What's going to have to happen to me internally to cause this goal?" That is such a different way to go about your best next step.
One of my favorite exercises is to put yourself in a moment of success. It could be two weeks from now, it could be next week, it could be three months from now. You get to choose. But I want you to put yourself in a moment of success. Maybe you're standing on a stage and 10,000 people are in the audience. Maybe you just gave your first talk and there are five people in the audience. Maybe you don't have a newsletter list yet and you start one and you put on your best friend. (That's how most of us started, by the way.) You know what I'm talking about.
So you look at that moment of success, that moment where you feel like you've really done something amazing, and you're super proud. You're in that moment, and then I want you to ask yourself this question: What did that person do to cause that moment to happen? Because that is where all the magic lies, and that is how you get yourself back on track. I want you to go do that exercise, and then I want you to do two things today, two things that that person did to cause that success. Get them done. Go kick some assets!
